Digg's Jay Adelson Speaks!

At some point and sooner than later, if I had to make a bet, Digg will be sold. And, likely as not, the most likely owner for the popular new site is Google.

And it is no real secret in Silicon Valley that the pair have been talking on and off for a while now, as Google (GOOG) mulls where to take Google News and Digg ponders how it can grow and improve its reliability by being linked to the largest and most neutral company it can.

But after all the Sturm und Drang around news of a phony bidding war for Digg between Google and Microsoft (MSFT) with prices hovering around $200 million that broke out a month ago (which BoomTown refuted in a post here), I thought it was long about time I chatted with its CEO Jay Adelson, to talk about the future of Digg and also the state of news online.

While photogenic Digg founder Kevin Rose often gets the focus as the geek-in-charge at the company, Adelson has had as much skin in the game and also has a deep tech background at early Internet networking companies like Netcom and also as a founder of Equinix.

Traveling between his home in New York and Digg’s San Francisco HQ, Adelson has been helming the user-generated news-discovery site, as it has grown to its current 27 million unique monthly visitors and 250 million page views. Adelson says Digg is poised to be profitable this year.

And while it is easy to find problems–pointing to aggressive competitors like Mixx and Yahoo’s (YHOO) BuzzTracker and serious and nagging issues around technological glitches (like yesterday, for example)–Digg still remains one of the most interesting and substantial start-ups to emerge from the Web 2.0 landscape.

Adelson talks about all this, with an interesting perspective on the hothouse that is Silicon Valley and also where things are going in the digital sector.

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